Overview

For the spring 2013 VIZA 615: Computer Animation course we chose a quadrupedal animal to faithfully recreate in both form and motion. I chose to recreate a lioness because of the rigging challenge present in the visible musculature of the lioness. I studied the anatomy in order to model it accurately and place joints correctly. I then analyzed its gait and motion and used that research to develop a script in Python to generate a rig that would allow me to animate the animal correctly. For the muscle system, I initially looked into the Maya Muscle system, however the overhead and complexity of the setup seemed unwarranted for my goals with this project. So I instead created a custom script in Python that allowed me to paint the individual muscle regions and then control how much they bulged based on the joint angle.